Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [150]
Alas for the poor lecturer, continued the Pole; his work was for naught: “The more he held forth about it, the more we rebelled inwardly, hoping against hope. Faces became set with determination.”76
Another Pole, Gustav Herling, described his camp’s cultural activities as a “vestigial reminder of the regulations drawn up in Moscow in the days when the camps really were intended to be corrective, educational institutions. Gogol would have appreciated this blind obedience to an official fiction despite the general practice of the camp—it was like the education of ‘dead souls.’”77
These views are not unique: they are found in the vast majority of memoirs, most of which either fail to mention the KVCh, or deride it. For that reason, it is difficult, when writing about the function of propaganda in the camps, to know how to rate its importance to the central administration. On the one hand, it can be reasonably argued (and many do) that camp propaganda, like all Soviet propaganda, was pure farce, that no one believed it, that it was produced by the camp administration purely in order to fool the prisoners in a rather juvenile and transparent manner.
On the other hand, if the propaganda, the posters, and the political indoctrination sessions were completely farcical—and if no one believed in them at all—then why was so much real time and real money wasted on them? Within the records of the Gulag administration alone, there are hundreds and hundreds of documents testifying to the intensive work of the Cultural-Educational Department. In the first quarter of 1943, for example, at the height of the war, frantic telegrams were sent back and forth from the camps to Moscow, as camp commanders desperately tried to procure musical instruments for their prisoners. Meanwhile, the camps held a contest on the theme “The Great Motherland War of the Soviet People Against the German Fascist Occupiers”: fifty camp painters and eight sculptors participated. At this time of national labor shortages, the central organs also recommended that every camp employ a librarian, a film technician to show propaganda movies, and a kultorganizator, a prisoner assistant to the cultural instructor, who would help conduct the “battle” for cleanliness, raise the cultural level of prisoners, organize artistic activity—and help teach the prisoners to “correctly understand questions of contemporary politics.”78
The camp cultural instructors also filed semi-annual or quarterly reports on their work, often listing their achievements in great detail. The KVCh instructor of Vosturallag, at the time a camp for 13,000 prisoners, sent one such report, for example, also in 1943. The twenty-one-page report begins with the admission that, in the first half of 1943, the camp’s industrial plan was “not fulfilled.” In the second half of that year, however, steps were taken. The Cultural-Educational Department had helped to “mobilize prisoners to fulfill and overfulfill the production tasks set by comrade Stalin,” to “return prisoners to health and prepare for winter,” and to “liquidate insufficiencies in cultural-educational work.”79 The camp KVCh chief then went on to list the methods he deployed. He notes grandly that in the second half of that year, 762 political speeches were given, attended by 70,000 prisoners (presumably, many attended more than once). At the same time, the KVCh held 444 political information sessions, attended by 82,400 prisoners; it printed 5,046 “wall newspapers,” read by 350,000 people; it put on 232 concerts and plays, showed 69 films, and organized